Have you ever gotten the chills when you had to make an educated guess on a guesstimate question? Do you want to know what the most common types of interview guesstimate questions are and how to answer them? If you want to work in consulting, you need to know how to make estimates. To give good answers to these questions, it’s important to know how big the local market is.
This article will talk about the guesstimate questions that people ask most often and how to answer them. Most interviewers for management jobs use made-up scenarios to see how well candidates can make decisions, think critically, and solve problems. You only need your best guesses and estimates to figure out the right answers to these guesstimate questions. When you’re in this kind of situation, what matters more than how right your answer is is how you answer. Let’s dig deeper into some questions that people often ask.
How to Answer Questions Based on Guesses
The first step in finding a proxy is to find out as much as you can about the question’s focus area, such as the size and type of the market. Feel free to ask the interviewer guesstimate questions that will help you understand. But keep in mind that leading questions won’t help you find the answer. For single-line questions, you can ask for a yes or no answer.
Dissect the problem. You can use a pencil and paper to try to figure out the answer. You’ll need to do some math based on your best guesses about how big the market is.
Solve each part of the problem on its own, then see if you can put the answers together to get the whole.
Things to remember
No definite conclusions: Questions in an interview that are based on guesses or assumptions are not accurate. The results are always close to the real thing.
Don’t bother looking for fractions. If you’re answering a question that only needs an educated guess, there’s no need to be precise.
Write things down, and write down the results of any math you do.
Keep talking about the written calculations all the time.
Usually Guessable Questions to Ask in an Interview
Mumbai’s monthly tea consumption:
First, you should read the guesstimate questions, and then you should break them up into pieces that you can handle. About 20% of the 18 crore people who live in Mumbai are probably children, and it’s unlikely that any of them drink tea. 10% of people don’t drink at all, 20% drink tea sometimes, 20% drink tea all the time, and the remaining 30% drink tea every day. Thus, tea drinkers can be divided into three categories: those who drink daily, weekly, or never.
How did we get there? daily population times the number of cups of tea drunk each day per cent of the total population per week
Non-drinkers-0
One drink every two weeks = 1 * 1 * 0.2 = 0.2
Seven times three times 0.2 is four points two, which is the formula for a regular drinker.
Each regular drinker drinks about 6.5 times 1.6 billion, or 10.4 cups, every week. This adds up to 41.6 billion cups every month.
Second, how many Indians have an iPhone?
Most likely, not many Indians under 25 or over 65 have an iPhone. So, those people, who make up 40% of the population, will not be included. Indians number 1.39 billion. Even if we take out the people who have never had an iPhone, 834,000,000 people are still left. The iPhone is affordable for people in the upper middle class and above. When iPhone prices go up, 14% of these people will be taken off this list. Even though only 3.2% of people can buy an iPhone, the other 717 million can. In India, there are about 22 million iPhone users.
Third, how many fridges are sold in India every year?
450 million people live in India if we assume that each of its 130 million families has four members. Because of this, there are 32,500,000 homes. People can be roughly put into three groups: the poor, the middle class, and the rich. There is also a clear difference between the big cities, the secondary or tertiary cities, and the smaller towns. People in every city think that rich people have refrigerators.
Here, the percentages are broken down by type.
There are 20%, 40%, and 20% of people living in poverty in each metro area.
Rich = 40%, 50%, and 10% for the middle class in Tier II and Tier III cities.
60% of the people in the village are poor, 38% are in the middle class, and 2% are rich.
When figuring out how many refrigerators will sell, you have to take into account two different types of demand: 1) demand for brand-new units and 2) demand for used units that will be replaced after 10 years. So, the sum can be found by taking into account all of these things.
Compared to the ant, how much do you think the elephant weighs?
As an example, let’s say that the average weight of an elephant is 3,600 kilogrammes and the average weight of an ant is 3 milligrammes.
If we convert kilogrammes to milligrammes, we find that an elephant weighs three billion milligrammes. The ratio is 3,600,000,000:3, which is 120,000,000:1 milligramme.
Can a full set of tennis balls fit in a car?
Find out how much space is inside the car. Before you can move on, you need to know two things: (1) Is there no one in the car? Second place goes to car brands and models. Then, we need to figure out how big the tennis ball is, so we’ll use a 2-inch length. How to figure out the volume: (4 PI r3).
The volume of the ball is 4 13 = 12.
We need to figure out how big the car is, so let’s do some math. Take the length to be 800 inches, the width to be 80 inches, and the height to be 60 inches.
The vehicle’s volume is 8008060=1500000in.
Let’s say that removing the trunk and back seat gives you access to 500,000 litres.
Figure out how many balls it will take to fill the car. A car can have as many as 500,012 tennis balls in it.
How many square feet of pizza do Americans eat every month, and how big is the average pizza?
The United States has about 300 million people, which is something to think about. It’s possible that 200 million people eat pizza every week. Because the average pizza eater eats two slices at each meal and two whole pizzas every month. For one person, that’s about four slices per month. If a standard pizza is 6 inches across, then the slice is 30 inches long. So, 120 square inches is the area of 4 pieces of pizza.
So, to sum up:
About 300,000,000 people call this planet their home.
The area of a standard pizza is 30 square inches.
If a person is a foot tall, they eat four slices of pizza every month, which is 120 square inches.
Two hundred million square feet per month
Summary
The focus of this piece was on hypothetical interview questions and how to answer them. When it comes to guesstimate questions, there is no such thing as a 100% accurate answer because the answers are always estimates. Interviewers ask this kind of question to see how well you can think critically, solve problems, and make decisions. In this way, we applaud how well the article did. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask them in the “Feedback” section.
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